Indians protesting management of funds
by Jeremy Cox
Scripps Howard News Service
Rocky Mountain News
Interior Secretary Gale Norton ordered an overhaul late Wednesday of a system that has failed to collect billions in royalties from Indian land.
Norton’s action came amid threats that she and close to 50 government officials could face contempt of court citations and possible jail time for neglecting to comply with a U.S. District Court order to fix the mismanaged system.
Under the proposal, Norton will appoint an official to run a newly created Bureau of Indian Trust Assets Management, which will reform the trust fund, according to court documents. Deputy Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles has said he will take temporary responsibility for the program.
But in a statement Thursday, the Blackfeet Nation member who is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against the Interior Department said Norton’s policy is a last-minute effort to avoid court intervention that would take the fund out of her department’s hands.
“The bottom line is that the plan . . . is a clear admission by the government that everything we . . . have been alleging for five and a half years was true,” said Elouise Cobell, who initiated the suit in 1996 on behalf of 300,000 American Indians.
“The trust is a shambles and in need of top-to-bottom reconstruction,” Cobell added.
The government created the Indian trust accounts in 1887 to handle royalties from grazing, logging, mining and oil drilling on 54 million acres of Indian land. Many of the payments, however, were lost, stolen or never collected.
Today, about $500 million passes through the accounts each year.
Presiding over the case has been U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, who recently scolded the Interior Department for ignoring his orders. Nearly two years ago, he instructed the department to conduct a historical accounting that would have shown how much money the Indians were owed and into which accounts the royalties should go.
Instead of complying with the order, Lamberth said, then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt performed a smaller statistical sampling. Just after entering office, Norton decided to follow her predecessor’s lead and adopted sampling, too.
“Her first action was so clearly contemptuous, I don’t understand what it is that we are going to try,” Lamberth told Mark E. Nagle, one of the government’s lawyers on the case, on Oct. 30. Last week, Department of Justice lawyers told Norton to seek independent counsel. Norton, a former Colorado attorney general, hired Denver attorney Herbert Fenster.
Lamberth is set to decide whether to move forward with the contempt charges at a Nov. 30 hearing.
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